Some applications require right angle indication lights. Right angle indication lights are used in any application that has a mother board or main circuit board with all the components 90 degrees or right angle to the front panel, face plate or operator interface. The panel or faceplate has holes, or small windows with matte transparent labels attached for visual status indication of some kind, usually 90 degrees to the main circuit board edge and above or below a distance Y within the context of a three dimensional X-Y-Z space of a surface of the main circuit board. Lighting is usually mounted in these areas of the main circuit board. For example, this is the format in telecom rack equipment, servers, computers, disc drives, and other electronic equipment throughout many Industries such as telecommunications, industrial, medical, and consumer products.
Current available options have many drawbacks. For example, some applications use a thru hole light emitting diode (LED) (an LED with two leads and a dome) that was formed at right angles inside a black LED housing circuit board indicators (CBI) with leads extending enough to mount into two plated thru holes in a mother board or main circuit board. However, the thru hole CBI LEDs often do not survive surface mount reflow processing with temperatures up to 260 degrees Celsius (° C.) on the same side of the mother board or main circuit board as the LED component.
Other options include a right angle prism. The prism uses a prism lens which directs the light out at right angles from a light source. However, in the prism the LED light source, die or chip is a distance away and 90 degrees from the lens output viewing surface. In the prism implementations, the light loss from the LED die or chip to an output surface of the lens can be as high as 50% or more, hence it requires brighter LEDs at the input to obtain a reasonable viewing output. This leads to inefficient lighting, more energy consumption and/or added heat output. Moreover, these disadvantages of the prism are magnified as the required vertical distance for placing the light output above the main circuit board increases.